As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
As processors, graphics cards, random access memory (RAM) and other components in information handling systems have increased in clock speed and power consumption, the amount of heat produced by such components as a side-effect of normal operation has also increased. Often, the temperatures of these components need to be kept within a reasonable range to prevent overheating, instability, malfunction and damage leading to a shortened component lifespan. Accordingly, air movers (e.g., cooling fans and blowers) have often been used in information handling systems to cool information handling systems and their components.
Among the components whose thermal impact is increasing over time are memory devices, such as dual-inline memory modules (DIMMs) often used to implement dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Such thermal impact has increased as memory capacity and density used in information handling systems have increased, as well as increased power associated with improvements in DIMM technology. As memory capacities increase, higher-power memory modules may become more common, and thermal limits and thresholds in information handling systems may be increasingly violated in the absence of countermeasures. Traditional approaches to avoiding violation of such thermal limits and thresholds have included sales restrictions of memory devices by suppliers of information handling systems. In addition, it has traditionally been difficult to actively throttle or put power caps on memory modules within a server system using existing methods.